Researching anti-cancer therapeutics
Dr. George Demetri is a Greek-American Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the director of the Center for Sarcoma and Bone Oncology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, director of the Ludwig Center at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and executive director for Clinical and Translational Research at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He was one of the Greek scientists included in the list with the world’s most influential scientific minds 2015 issued by Thomson Reuters.
“Through these roles, I am able to link basic, translational and clinical research initiatives across multiple departments to bring together new collaborations focused on experimental therapeutics within the Ludwig Cancer Research community”, says Dr. Demetri.
He graduated from the School of Medicine from Stanford University, and was a Fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Hematology & Oncology. He was an Assistant Professor of Medicine, at Harvard Medical School (1992-2001) and an Associate Professor of Medicine, at Harvard Medical School (2001-2012). Before that he worked as Clinical Associate, an Associate Physician and an Associate Attending Physician at Somerville Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
His academic career has been devoted to applying novel insights from fundamental molecular biological and biochemical research to the problems of human cancer to develop rationally targeted anti-cancer therapeutics in an academic environment.
His most important awards are: the Claire W. and Richard P. Morse Research Award, 2005, the
Emil J. Freireich Award in Clinical Cancer Research, 2002, and the Focused Giving Program Award, Johnson and Johnson Foundation, 1993.
As Dr. Demetri describes in one of his interviews: “When I was young I always had somebody in my family who was taking chemotherapy for some sort of cancer, so I have personal experience with the cancer experience on the side of the family and I always wanted to try to make a difference for patients and families with cancer, and I feel tremendously privilleged to be here and to make a difference along with the team we have assembled. Our practice takes a very patient inclusive approach, we feel that as medical professionals we will have seen many many thousands more patients with sarcomas than any individual patient or family experience. And what we try to do is share that experience with the patients themselves and with the family members, help them to know their option, and to be involved in all the decisions for treatment, and whether to participate in new research protocols and programs, and then involve them in the decision making and together come with the best course of action that might give them the best possible outcomes.